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I read the original thread on reddit and this pretty much sums up what I silently thought to myself. It was a nice touch to get in front of the reddit crowd, b

• niyazpk 16y ago
  That last sentence does not belong here. EDIT: "...completely sidestepped hard questions" is a perfectly understandable sentence that does not require an analogy to explain its meaning. The last sentence does not add any value. Taking it out will only increase the quality of the comment.
  • benreesman 16y ago
    care to elaborate? nothing is sacred to a hacker.
    • riffraff 16y ago
      why not? Anyway, I guess the point was that by adding wording that may be offensive to some readers you are not improving the quality of the message, unless you want _that_ to be the message, which is in fact the (wanted or not) result of the OP. (nonetheless a decent analogy)
    • DrJokepu 16y ago
      Because unnecessarily offending people is not the best way to win friends.
      • bambax 16y ago
        Is commenting about making friends? Isn't finding the truth more important? Strong analogies are a way (not the only way, but a way) to do that.
        • DrJokepu 16y ago
          I believe making friends (and not making enemies) is simply the most important skill you can have. More important than being clever or hardworking. And I also don't think that analogies are a very good way to discover truth as they often oversimplify a situation and take things out of context, hence implying the wrong conclusions.
          • alextgordon 16y ago
            Analogies help understanding. There's a reason math textbooks have worked examples, instead of merely a list of definitions and proofs. Understanding is considerably more difficult in a vacuum.
          • points 16y ago
            > "I believe making friends (and not making enemies) is simply the most important skill you can have. More important than being clever or hardworking." Reminds me of an old boss of mine. He was hiring for the team, and when asked what the main skillset needed was for the new positions, he answered "They must get on well with the team". So, lo and behold, few months later we had a few new employees who were nice people, good fun even, but absolutely incompetent at their jobs.
      • swombat 16y ago
        I don't think he was trying to win friends.
        • deleted 16y ago
          [deleted]
    • dingle_thunk 16y ago
      "nothing is sacred to a hacker." Except, apparently, recursion.
  • Torn 16y ago
    It's a little heavy-handed, but a pretty good analogy.
• pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >he doesn't answer the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible So you're saying: child abuse - IE9 has less instances of $problem than in the general browser population homosexuality - IE9 doesn't allow $action and thinks it shouldn't be allowed elsewhere bloodshed - IE9 is a browser and it's code has errors too ridiculous things - I don't like IE9 so IMO MS is full of BS
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  • latortuga 16y ago
    They tell me not to feed the trolls but here goes anyway. You have constructed a straw man. He is not saying that one IE9 problem corresponds to one problem with the catholic church - in fact you made that up! Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them. This is made evident by the tl;dr version but is just as obvious if you read the original thread. It is impolite to put words (and other ridiculous things) in other people's mouths.
    • pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      Ha, and here's me thinking it was I that was feeding the trolls, perhaps we're into trollish recursion here. He trolled me, I trolled him back, you're trolling me now. Touché? In fact what he was trying to do was pass off as truth several controversial and highly volatile statements without proper [on-topic] opportunity for retort wrapped up as an argument against Microsoft's effort to troll Reddit. >Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them. The Catholic church certainly has much to blame with how they've handled the revelation of child abuse amongst it's followers. However, the current situation can not faithfully be described as ignorant. If the head of the IE9 dev team were meeting people in person who'd had been "victim" to the beta, then perhaps there's some comparison. Maybe if it were a metaphor for their past behaviour - but this is the rub, there are huge [unsupported] assumptions required to leap to the point at which this metaphor is even valid. That then isn't addressing whether it's useful. My post was intended to be inflammatory in interpreting his statements in a way that would clearly (to me) conflict with his views without giving him a genuine avenue for reply. Trollish, perhaps, but there ya go I'd assume that the thread would be downvoted and ignored generally on the basis of the OC content but instead it was being heavily voted up. Perhaps reddit is down?
• patio11 16y ago
  Take it to Reddit, please.
  • alecco 16y ago
    I like your comments, in general. But this one comes too aggressive against the whole reddit community and it's a disproportionate response. I'd rather say: Could you please take that kind of topic to the proper forum, perhaps r/atheism, please? HN focus on startups, business and technology only. Think of it as r/technology + r/programming + r/business. Thank you for understanding.
    • patio11 16y ago
      We could talk about what the proportionate response is to being lumped in with child rapists, but we intentionally avoid that on HN because there is no way that conversation ends well. So. Take it to Reddit.
      • Herring 16y ago
        Ironic, because this is the same pc attitude that prompted that marketer to write the pages of bullshit that reddit saw through. Didn't your pg write an article on this? When a group wants its superstitions given preference over the truth, I'll gladly be the first to leave.
  • flatline 16y ago
    While I may agree with you, this type of meta conversation is getting really old, it seems to be happening more recently on HN. I would honestly rather see the comment stand alone or see a decent rebuttal than half a page of useless chatter about it. If people upvote it, you are free to ignore it. You can take this to Reddit, too.
• pavel_lishin 16y ago
  > It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible. Weird, I just read one about an Atheist -> Catholic conversion, and he side-stepped those issues as well. (And I say 'as well', I mean 'also', because he didn't do as good of a job as the Microsoft rep did.)
  • assemble 16y ago
    I can't blame them for side-stepping those issues--I would do the same thing. Anytime someone mentions that they're Catholic on reddit, people automatically assume that (1)you are fully versed in everything about the situation, (2)you agree with how the Church handled it all, (3)you must be contributing to it by staying in the Church, etc. We're all generally angry about this problem. I don't know a single person who approves of the practice of just moving people around, but there are so many complexities to the issue. I can't even begin to discuss the finer points without someone piping up with their random, pointless garbage that taints the conversation. The Catholic Church has done a lot to fix the problems with the child abuse stuff. We've stopped with the Crusades (and apologized for them!). And the Catholic Church's stance on homosexuality and things of that nature are much more nuanced than people realize. Honestly, most of us are just tired of talking about these things. (Except the crazies who get all the press. The news people don't like talking to sensible people--that doesn't make for good TV.) Really, most of the stuff on reddit about Catholics is vitriol and hate, and there's really no point to answer obvious flame bait questions when there are other perfectly good questions to answer.
    • redthrowaway 16y ago
      What's complicated about moving priests around? It seems to be entirely cynical and self-serving. Had they handled the issues differently, you wouldn't see the vitriol. I'm sorry, but you can't claim to be a member and defender of an organization that has institutionalized child rape and yet take umbrage at those who suggest your membership in said organization offers monetary and moral support to those practices. If the practice of shuffling priests and shielding them from the law is a complex one, then by all means describe how that's so. It certainly doesn't look complex to the rest of us. It looks evil.
• tiles 16y ago
  [Responding critically because this comment was posted critically.] I had to re-read the Catholic comment before I found you weren't being intentionally offensive. The analogy would have been better stated if it were a Catholic priest doing an AMA. Asking a Catholic would be like asking an IE user why a Microsoft employee was arrested for embezzling, why Microsoft doesn't support Open Source, or why they arbitrarily refuse to make their browser more cross-platform. An IE user is justified in dodging the question since they don't really control those things, they just use the product.
  • lenni 16y ago
    You said it better than I did. A Catholic priest, who has credible authority talking in detail, would have been better. If you go in front of a crowd who is outraged by the actions of the organisation you're representing, do expect difficult questions.
  • saulhoward 16y ago
    It's interesting that you see the relationship between a Catholic and his/her church as analogous to that between a corporation and their "users". While believers in 'ethical consumption' would say that the moral principles of producers certainly should be a concern for consumers, not everybody agrees. But when choosing a religious creed, the behaviour of the founders and keepers of the faith is surely of paramount importance. Can you really say that issues of child abuse are not interesting to Catholic followers, because they "just use the product"?
• tptacek 16y ago
  I saw this comment yesterday and didn't take the bait, because I figured, hey, this HN, it'll find the faint grey bottom of the thread soon enough. I'm embarrased by what happened instead.